Shot by Shot: Building a Scene in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Vietnam Epic

“The Vietnam War,” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s panoramic 18-hour television documentary, includes 10 set-piece battle scenes documenting the action from multiple perspectives. Among them is the battle of Binh Gia, which took place in late December 1964, 40 miles southeast of Saigon.

Binh Gia, a so-called strategic hamlet that was home to some 6,000 anti-Communist Vietnamese Catholics, may not be well known in the United States, which in 1964 had yet to send any official combat troops to Vietnam. But the confrontation there was a turning point: both a testing ground for Hanoi’s newly aggressive approach, and proof, to many, that South Vietnam could not defeat the Communists without increased American support.

The battle was also unusually well-documented, visually speaking, by both sides. “We don’t always have material from a particular place, at a particular time,” Ms. Novick said. “But this was an incredible treasure trove.”

The nearly 15-minute scene, edited by Erik Ewers, draws on a number of sources, including a black-and-white battle film held at the Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi, color home movies taken by an American officer and the filmmakers’ interviews with three people who were there: an American Marine, a South Vietnamese marine and a Viet Cong officer.

The scene begins with Philip Brady, a Marine who arrived in Vietnam in November 1964 as one of the American advisers sent to help the South Vietnamese military.

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The Vietnam Film Project/Florentine Films

It was Mr. Brady, whom Ms. Novick met early in the research process, who first mentioned Binh Gia. “He told me he had been at this really important battle,” she recalled. But he said he would only be interviewed if the filmmakers could find a photograph of him from Binh Gia that had appeared in Paris-Match sometime in 1965. (All Mr. Brady’s photographs from the war had been lost in a fire.)

Months of sleuthing eventually turned up the original image, which was in The Associated Press’s vast Vietnam archive, in a folder labeled “Advisers.”

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Associated Press

Mr. Brady also led the film’s researchers to home movie footage, taken on a camera owned by his senior officer, Capt. Frank P. Eller. Footage used early in the scene shows American and South Vietnamese soldiers training, sharing meals and relaxing together.

The scene moves from Mr. Brady to Tran Ngoc Toan, a veteran of the South Vietnamese marine unit Mr. Brady was attached to, which was known as the Killer Sharks. He was interviewed at his home in Houston, where a large population of South Vietnamese refugees settled after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

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The Vietnam Film Project/Florentine Films

A graduate of the elite military academy at Dalat, Mr. Toan had been fighting the Viet Cong for more than two years. “You are not my adviser,” he affectionately recalls telling Mr. Brady. “You are my helper.”

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Tran Ngoc Toan

The scene then introduces Nguyen Van Tong, a former Viet Cong political officer who had been at Binh Gia, whom Ms. Novick interviewed twice in Vietnam.

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The Vietnam Film Project/Florentine Films

Mr. Tong talks calmly about his brother, a Viet Cong scout who was killed, but is nearly overcome when he mentions his brother’s fiancée, who took her life rather than marry another man — a powerful detail their translator initially missed.

“We didn’t know why he was so upset until later,” Ms. Novick said. “We showed the footage to a Vietnamese speaker, who said, ‘Your subtitle is wrong.’ It was really unexpected.”

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The Vietnam Film Project/Florentine Films

Tension rises as the scene builds toward the battle itself. Music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who scored the documentary, begins quietly pulsing. Color footage of the Saigon forces loading onto trucks bleeds into black-and-white footage of smiling Communist fighters (some 2,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops had filtered into the area) marching through the jungle.

An after-action map belonging to Mr. Tong illustrates the Communists’ plan: seize the village, then destroy the South Vietnamese forces sent to retake it, using heavy weapons smuggled in from the coast.

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Nguyen Van Tong

Footage from the Vietnam Film Institute shows how the Communists, before dawn on Dec. 28, overwhelmed the village militia and took control. Men are shown being led away, hands raised in surrender, before a cut to a shot of the Saigon forces’ helicopters overhead.

The scene tracks the escalating confrontation. South Vietnamese troops flown into the area are ambushed, and on Dec. 30, Mr. Brady, Mr. Toan and the rest of Mr. Toan’s battalion are sent in to reinforce them. The Communists, who had withdrawn to the east of the village, are shown firing up at a helicopter over their command post, which is downed, killing four Americans.

Twelve South Vietnamese marines from Mr. Toan’s unit, which was dispatched to retrieve the American bodies, are ambushed and killed. The screen goes black to the sound of gunfire and shouting, followed by color footage from Mr. Eller’s home movie, showing soldiers covering bodies lying in a field with a cloth.

An American helicopter swoops down to retrieve the bodies of the four American advisers, but leaves the Vietnamese bodies behind. “We told them, ‘Hey, try to get all my body out of here too,’” Mr. Toan said. “But they refuse to pick up our body.”

Much of the battle footage in the documentary was silent, so the filmmakers had to add every bullet, shout and boot crunch, sometimes layering as many as 100 tracks. The sound designers started with a library of sound effects, including some made for “Apocalypse Now,” and also spent a day running in the woods in New Hampshire, firing period-correct weapons.

They also recorded various kinds of unintelligible crowd noise known as “walla,” in both English and Vietnamese (with Northern and Southern accents), which can be heard in the Binh Gia sequence and throughout the film.

Footage of triple-canopy forest in Hawaii (shot for Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick’s 2007 documentary about World War II) stands in for Vietnam, as we hear about how the Viet Cong moved through the trees that night, collecting their dead and killing any South Vietnamese soldiers still alive. Mr. Tran spent three days crawling toward the village, playing dead when Communist fighters found him.

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American Lives II Film Project/Florentine Films

When it was over, five Americans and 200 South Vietnamese were dead, and 32 Viet Cong bodies had been left on the battlefield. The narrator, Peter Coyote, sums up the aftermath as footage shows survivors being carried through a field filled with bodies.

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ITN Source

Ho Chi Minh exulted in the victory, calling it “a little Dien Bien Phu,” a reference to the famous rout of the French in 1954. Mr. Tong, the Viet Cong fighter, calls Binh Gia “a historic milestone” in the war.

“If the Americans hadn’t gotten involved,” he says, “we would have entered Saigon in 1966.”

Three months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent the first American combat troops to Vietnam. The war lasted 10 more years.

Correction: September 1, 2017
An earlier version of this article misspelled, in some instances, part of the name of a South Vietnamese veteran. As the article correctly notes elsewhere, he is Tran Ngoc Toan, not Tuan.